1) Heartbleed hits Linux

The big news this past week that has been inescapable was the emergence of the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL, which is a key part of nearly every Linux distribution. The OpenSSL project first reported the flaw on April 7 and is identified as CVE-2014-0160.

"A missing bounds check in the handling of the TLS heartbeat extension can be used to reveal up to 64k of memory to a connected client or server," the OpenSSL advisory stated.

Big Linux vendors including Red Hat had to scramble on April 7 to build packages for the OpenSSL update. Red Hat pushed out its first patches on April 8.

"Our role in the Free Software ecosystem should extend beyond being a solid distribution for others to base on: we should use our existing position and expertise to contribute to solving additional important challenges," Nussbaum wrote in his campaign platform. "Doing things the Debian way also increases the visibility and impact of Debian itself, and thus of the important values for which we fight for as a project."

3) Linux 3.15

The first release candidate for the Linux 3.15 kernel is now available and Linus Torvalds warns that it's big.

"Sure, we've had releases with more files and lines changed (3.7-rc1 and 3.11-rc1 in particular), but those tended to have something particular going on(3.7-rc1 saw the largely automated UAPI header file disintegration and 3.11 saw the bug staging lustre merge)," Torvalds wrote. "In comparison to those large releases, 3.15-rc1 is just big in general. No single big thing, but just lots and lots of commits."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at LinuxPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist